Joel McHale has a warning for fans eager to see the upcoming Community installment penned by his Oscar-winning co-star Jim Rash: “It was pretty bad.”

The Soup host did, however, say this in jest while sitting directly next to Rash, who actually echoed his friend’s silly sentiments. “It’s true,” joked the man behind the screenplay for The Descendants (which took home the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2012), adding: “I just wrote words on a napkin and said, ‘Let’s see what happens!'”

Truth be told, the episode (the 10th of the NBC sitcom’s fourth season) sounds pretty must-see. “It mainly centers on Troy and Abed, and is a play on some body-switching worlds,” Rash shared during a recent set visit. “It’s very Greendale in the sense that it’s warped, but there’s a lot of heart [and brings] some resolution to key things that play out over the season.”

If the actor/writer’s Community offering sounds vaguely familiar, it’s likely because his vision was loosely influenced by Freaky Friday — though, he noted, the classic “Jodie Foster one,” not the more recent Lindsay Lohan remake.

Another aspect of scriptwriting is ultimately watching the cast — or in this case Rash’s own co-stars — perform his work. “It definitely made the table read a bit more challenging,” he recalled with a laugh. “I obviously wrote stuff for myself [to read], too, but to sit there and hear it all out loud, [I was] going: ‘Ooh, fix that!’ or, ‘Oh, good!'”

“Honestly,” McHale added, much more seriously this time, “it was great.”